Should You Only Promote Products You Love?
I’ve been reading the brilliant book on the left for the last couple of weeks and it’s got me thinking about marketing in general. One of the key points that David Ogilvy makes is that he only ever had 19 clients and they were all clients that he loved, he believed in all their products and he would only ever promote products that he was passionate about. Is that feasible though? In this day and age?
When you start promoting a product either as an individual or an agency you are effectively in charge of getting more people to buy that product or service. Now I am going to go out on a limb here and say the perfect karma does not exist to connect every marketeer with products they love which must mean that some of us are promoting stuff we don’t believe in. Is that right though? Should you promote something that you wouldn’t buy or use yourself and was Ogilvy right when he said that you should only promote products you love?
The picture becomes even more blurred when you are talking about start up businesses. At least with a large business they can probably afford not to have their marketing work perfectly but with a start up having a successful sales and marketing strategy might mean the difference between the life or death of the entire company. Surely it must be wrong to take money from a company when you know that their product has little or no chance of success? Maybe it’s not? Maybe if you believe you are the best in town then it only has the best chance of success with your marketing even though the product isn’t quite right?
There are many other complications including the various people within an agency. Some might love product X while others would only use product Y. Not everybody can be the founder or director of an agency and choose which products they get to work on. What if you are a brilliant marketeer within a company and you get handed a dog of a product to promote by your boss?
I don’t have all the answers to this question and it’s been bothering me for the last week. I know plenty of marketers read this blog so I’d love to hear what you have to say? Surely even though we’d all only love to work on products we absolutely love it’s only people as talented and selective as Mr Ogilvy that get to choose?
